This invention relates to telephones operable to be configured remotely, perhaps by a central office, or an another telephone in communication with the telephone to provide subscriber features.
Various telephone companies are providing features such as Caller Identification on Call Waiting with Disposition (DSCWID) and Custom Calling Features (CCF) to residential telephone subscribers. To take advantage of such services, residential customers must purchase specialized equipment capable of handling the features offered by the telephone company. Furthermore, generally once such services are requested, they are kept active on the telephone permanently. There is no convenient way to dynamically change the complement of features available to the subscriber.
Some manufacturers have allowed for dynamic requests of telephone company services by providing a menu of services available, using an Analogue Display Services Interface (ADSI) communications protocol. Telephones which support the full ADSI protocol, however, tend to be expensive, as the ADSI protocol is intended to provide other features such as graphics based displays and the like. Another manufacturer provides a product which has a plurality of buttons, associated with all possible DSCWID options. With this product, it is inevitable that a user would be faced with having many keys which will be meaningless and which may have names unrecognizable to the user, unless the specific functions associated with the keys have been subscribed to by the user and have been explained to the user.
What would be desirable, therefore, is a way of permitting a telephone set equipped with an FSK receiver such as used for calling line ID reception to be programmed to enable certain features already programmed into the telephone to be used by a customer. This would allow telephone companies to provide dynamic customer access to DSCWID features, custom calling features, customized power-up prompts, display advertising, current telephone bill information, telephone company messages and the like. Individual customers may download only the features they have paid for, in whatever language they want, as many times as they want. This has advantages in that it reduces service calls provided by the telephone company, allows the customer easy access to revenue generating network features of the telephone company, allows the telephone company to brand line their products in whatever manner and in whatever language they wish and also permits the telephone company to provide promotions such as one month of free features to give users an opportunity to test certain features. In addition, the ability to read the status of a telephone from a remote location and use messaging to reprogram a telephone to effect a repair or to add features would be desirable. In addition, as telephone are used for services which require a certain degree of privacy, such as personal banking, it would be desirable to be able to blank out confidential sequences of keypad entries to prevent onlookers from determining passwords, bank account numbers and the like. The present invention addresses these needs.